


you 2uck (don't 2top)

by Laylah



Category: Homestuck
Genre: First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Sgrub, Quadrant Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stupid Sollux and his stupid misery. Now Karkat's going to have to go over there and make sure he's okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you 2uck (don't 2top)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snakewife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snakewife/gifts).



If the fucking nookstain had just gone completely silent, that would have been _easier_ to deal with. Karkat could have imagined that he was...out, or busy with something else, or even injured and unable to spend his time sitting on his husktop bullshitting with people. But no, Sollux can't do anything the fucking easy way. He doesn't actually shut up, just...make it really fucking clear that he's not okay. Instead of bitchy instant comebacks, there are long periods of almost-idle quiet, and then listless replies like he's not even trying to be a jerk anymore. He is an asshole, and if this is some coy stupid bid for pity, then—

Well fuck him right in the auditory canal, because it's kind of working. More than kind of. It's working enough for Karkat to be stocking his sylladex with food and emergency supplies, sharpening his sickles and pretending he can't hear the agitated clicking of his lusus' claws. Stupid Sollux and his stupid misery.

Karkat leaving his hive is an incredibly bad idea, partly just in the way that it's a bad idea for _any_ young troll, but with a side of _what the fuck are you doing, you bulgehuffing moron_ because there's always the thing with his blood to worry about. Probably that's exactly what his lusus is trying to indicate with the complicated telegraphing system of its claw-snapping and skittering. You idiot grub, you are marching to your doom.

"Look," Karkat says, "if it were anyone else—" only that's hoofbeast shit; he can think of a few other trolls he'd do something like this for if he had to; if, for example, Terezi and Vriska's endless quest to one-up each other wound up with bloodshed or something the way it just might if they keep it up as they get older. Not that he'd have to come look after Terezi, not that he can honestly picture it. The girl's fucking crazy, but she keeps her own trauma under control. Gamzee's a better example, maybe: if he ever had a problem that eating toxic slime didn't cure, Karkat would want to fix it. It's just...it's a thing that's wrong with him, okay? And he knows that.

He sets out when it's still evening, barely, after one last warning for Sollux (DON'T GO ANYWHERE, he said; ii have nowhere two go, Sollux answered eventually). His hive is in a pretty sparsely populated area, but not all that far off from the oversized communal hivestem complex where Sollux lives. That's his other excuse: it would be a serious expedition to go see anyone else. He'd need a sun-protection strategy, stupid shit like that. He can get to Sollux without going _that_ far out of his way.

It still feels fucking weird, trudging up the transit corridor between the bulging hivestems, knowing there are strangers behind each viewing portal who can see him there. Trolls who wouldn't have any reason to hesitate before they called the drones on him if they found out he was—stop thinking like that, he tells himself. Don't act like a shitty fugitive and nobody will notice.

He finds the hivestem Sollux lives in after only getting lost two and a half times (if you turn around before you hit a dead end, it only half counts) and there isn't even any security stopping him from coming in the front door. There _are_ , unfortunately, a fuck load of stairs. He remembers dimly that Sollux warned him about that.

There are not enough warnings on all of Alternia. There might not be enough warnings in all of Alternian _history_. What kind of nookpanned piece of shit drone builds a high-rise hivestem without including a vertical transport facilitator? And what kind of douchebag decides to _live_ at the top of one? Karkat has to stop for a breather after nine floors, and again after fifteen, and he spends the entire span from floor nineteen to floor twenty-two wishing he had the breath to voice all the things he wants to call Sollux right now.

In the hallway on floor twenty-two, he leans against the wall and just waits for his miserable, outraged vascular pump to stop pounding so hard. He is _not_ going to show up to Sollux's door panting and—he touches his face nervously—flushed, crap. His horrible blood runs thin enough that it doesn't show through his skin very much, but considering that _at all_ is too much.... Fucking stairs.

When he thinks he has it together enough that he won't seem like too much of a tool knocking on Sollux's door, he trudges down the hall to hiveblock 2222. He stops, narrows his eyes at the door like he could warn it not to fucking try anything, and knocks sharply.

Nothing but quiet. For a second he imagines being a movie hero and breaking the fucking door down, arriving just in time to prevent...whatever. This isn't some huge drama, except maybe in Sollux's self-absorbed miserable head. Karkat knocks again, harder. Then a third time, followed up with a bracing, "Open the door, you nookmunching douche!" for emphasis.

The door unlatches and creaks open slightly. "KK?" says a thin, reedy voice from inside. "Ith that you?"

Karkat shoves, and the door flies open with no resistance, banging into the wall loudly enough that he'd flinch if he weren't in the middle of storming inside. "Yeah, it's me, wondering what the fuck you've been—what the _fuck_ ," he says, eloquence just fucking right off. Almost half of Sollux's hiveblock is taken up with the squat golden combs of a set of industrial-grade beehive mainframes. "How did you even—those are _yours_?"

"No," Sollux says, dry and snarky and okay, yeah, it was a stupid question, "I jutht woke up one night and there they were like a big thticky Twelfth Perigee'th Eve prethent." He's standing by the wall, watching Karkat in the doorway, this skinny long-limbed jerk with mismatched sunglasses on and two pairs of short horns sticking up out of the scruff of his hair. He's not holding any weapons but his posture says he's expecting a fight, and the air shimmers a little around him.

 _You have a lisp_ , Karkat doesn't say. He prefers to space out his completely inane observations more than that. "You sounded pretty fucked up on Trollian," he says instead. "So I thought I'd stop by to check."

"You thought you'd _thtop by_?" Sollux echoes. "Jutht like that?" His eyebrows arch up over the rims of his stupid-looking shades.

"What?" Karkat says, bristling a little. "You can believe in magical gifts from the fucking Perigee Behemoth but not," okay, he can't help himself, "in the goodneth of your fellow trollth?"

"Fuck off, athhole," Sollux says, but the fight goes out of his stance. "And shut the fucking door, were you raithed in a livethtock enclosure?"

Karkat kicks the door shut, more gently than he opened it in the first place, and takes a shuffling step further into the room. "You sound like you're doing better now than you were earlier," he says.

Sollux shrugs. "I'm fine," he says. "It wath nothing." The hell it was—he acted like he was barely holding his shit together every time Karkat talked to him for the last three nights. Karkat wonders if it would sound too pale for him to point that out, and before he's decided Sollux says, "Tho are you ath bad at gameth ath you are at programming?"

"You suck," Karkat says, "and I am a fucking gaming _master_. Gamegrubs shit themselves at my approach out of pure terror at the schoolfeeding they know they're about to receive."

"I'm going to thpank your pantth off," Sollux says, and his grin is disturbingly sharklike for someone who's nearly as far from being a seadweller as is physically possible.

"I'll believe that when I see it," Karkat says, and then he's catching a controller as it flies at his head. Sollux hasn't moved. Fucking showoff psionics.

They wind up flopped in a fucking horrendous pile of shitty computer manuals and discarded cables, playing Sollux's pirated copy of Imperial Brawl IX, which is the one where you can unlock the totally game-breaking laughsassin character whose rage mode is unstoppable. Both of them have more pride than to try to play him in a versus match, though.

Sollux is back in top asshole form, as if he never lost it in the first place. He gloats when he wins and makes excuses when he loses. He mocks Karkat's character choices even though his are worse. When Karkat wins matches, he gives in to temptation and goes for the ultra-post-finish-combo that reduces Sollux's character to brightly-colored lumps of grubloaf. It's almost satisfying enough.

At least until the third time that one of the buttons sticks _just_ as he's starting a counter-combo to prevent Sollux from wiping the floor with him. "Grubfucker!" Karkat howls, and when Sollux snickers at him he leans over to punch the douchebag in the shoulder—and feels the electric prickle of active psionics along his skin. "You're _cheating_ ," he says, a little awed at the titanium shame globes it takes to try that and think you can get away with it, but mostly feeling a desperate need to grab the insufferable prick and give him a good shaking. To start with.

"Took you long enough to notithe," Sollux says with this smirky little grin tugging up one corner of his mouth. Sainted hemorrhaging Mother Grub, Karkat thinks, Sollux is _flirting_ with him. He's a smug demanding obnoxious high-strung jerk and he smells like honey and circuitboards and his tongue's flickering along the points of his double rows of teeth and Karkat apparently forgot to captchalogue his self-control before he left his hive because he is _launching_ himself across the pile to knock Sollux down.

Sollux laughs breathlessly as Karkat slams into him and they both go flying, landing more gently than they should, and Karkat is grudgingly impressed at his ability to multitask, because he's using his powers to ease them away from the mainframes at the same time that he's licking his way into a hungry, needy kiss. The whole thing is fucking confusing, because maybe he pities Sollux sometimes but definitely not now, and maybe Sollux is annoying when he wants attention but Karkat wouldn't say that's enough for _hate_ , not the way it looks in the movies, but here they are sucking face like a couple of remoras and it feels _good_.

This is nothing like Karkat would have thought his first kiss would go. There was supposed to be building tension and an obvious relationship happening, perigees of wanting and fencing with the other troll to figure out their intentions, and for fuck's sake he was supposed to know whether it was black or red. But Sollux's fingers are twined tight enough in his hair to pull, and at the same time Sollux's tongue in his mouth is a gentle tease, and it's like he's trying to—fuck, he probably _is_ trying to make it both at once, with his ridiculous duality thing.

Karkat wouldn't want to encourage him by saying it out loud, but it's actually sort of cool. Sollux's body is warm and wiry against him, and the kiss has a faint hint of sweetness to it, and the grip on his hair doesn't so much hurt as it just makes all of his nerves feel _awake_. He runs his claws down Sollux's back to reciprocate—not too hard, not enough to tear fabric and reach skin, but it's enough to make Sollux growl in his throat and that is _way_ sexier than Karkat was expecting.

Sollux kisses harder, deeper, and the press of his tongue feels good but then his teeth scrape Karkat's lip and Karkat's nerves light up with something way more like panic than excitement. He pulls back. "Easy with the fangs, Captor."

"Oh, am I going too fatht for you?" Sollux asks, all syrupy fake concern.

Karkat rolls his eyes, doing his absolute best to make it look like he's annoyed and not freaked the fuck out. "Oh, do you not know how to do this without being a festering shitball about it?"

Bingo. "Hehe, don't get your bulge all bent out of shape," Sollux says. "Doethn't matter to me either way. I thought you were into all that thwaggering tough guy crap."

"Maybe I'm more complicated than you give me fucking credit for," Karkat says. It's okay. It's fine. Nobody has to bleed. His secret's safe. "Maybe you should let me do this my way."

"You thuck, KK," but he's smiling again as Karkat cups his face in both hands. "Get back here, fuckath."

Karkat's turn to snicker. "Since you asked so nicely," he says, and leans in. He's still not sure if this is a romance, but fuck it. He'll figure it out as they go along.


End file.
